U.S. Cyber Command leader and NSA director Gen. Keith Alexander made the information public on Tuesday in a briefing to the Senate Armed Services Committee, in which he testified, "I can't go into the specifics here, but we do see [thefts] from defense industrial base companies. There are some very public [attacks], though. The most recent one was the RSA exploits."

Indeed a massive amount of intellectual property is being stolen from both the public and private sector by Chinese hackers, according to Gen. Alexander. The U.S. has done precious little to protect its own economic prosperity, as it has been overwhelmed by the Chinese thieves. One official in past commentary graphically described a cyberwarfare compaign of an unnamed nation state (suspected to be China) as "raping" the world.

Whether the Chinese government is perpetrating these attacks first hand, sponsoring third parties to conduct them, or merely condoning corporate interests to conduct them is almost as hazy as the sketchy financial ties the Chinese government holds to many of its private sector business (to be fair such allegations have increasingly been raised about the U.S. gov't).

But at the end of the day, the result is the same -- the destruction of the U.S. economy at the hands of the Chinese attackers.

Spearphishing and an unreleased Flash exploit allowed China to hack the RSA standard and steal secrets from U.S. DOD contractors, according to NSA testimony.
[Image Source: RSA Security]

U.S. companies who speak out against the attacks are threatened by the Chinese. The Chinese government is more than willing to ban U.S. firms that rock the boat, locking them out of the lucrative emerging market of almost 1 billion internet-active device users.

Complains Gen. Alexander, "We need to make it more difficult for the Chinese to do what they're doing. Intellectual property isn't well protected, and we can do a better job at protecting it."

The security official shared interesting details of the attack. He says the RSA hack used a zero-day (unreleased) exploit of Adobe System Inc.'s (ADBE) Flash player (somewhere the spirit of Steve Jobs is smirking) and used "spearphishing" (targeted phishing) to get an RSA employee to click on the offending executable, resulting on backdoors being installed on the company's servers. Ironically, the Subcommittee hearings were livecast using Flash.

Gen. Alexander responded, "Industry has a bunch of signatures, government has those too. All of us need to work together to provide the best set of signatures."

He then countered that private sector communications efforts have been hindered by red tape. He compares the situation to a bank robbery in which no one can tell the police. He points to one incident in which the NSA detected 3 GB of data being stolen, stating, "I think that industry should have the ability to see these attacks and share them with us in real time. It's like neighborhood watch. Somebody is breaking into a bank, and somebody needs to be in touch with the police to stop it."

Is the U.S. surrendering its future by allowing China to victimize its businesses and defenses with no response? The hacks may go down in U.S. history as the nation's first unofficial surrender. [Image Source: Allison Nazarian]

On the upside Gen. Alexander says DOD efforts to establish a Cyber Command outpost at every major geographical and functional Combatant Command branch are coming along nicely. He points to a major recent combat exercise at Nellis Air Force base as a sign of that progress.

China is destroying the US economy by more ways than just that. Currency manipulation, not respecting intellectual rights, forcing US companies to manufacture in China if they want to sell there. Nope China seems to be getting the advantage in every aspect of trade with the US. Is this China's fault? Nope, its our faults for letting them do it.

"A politician stumbles over himself... Then they pick it out. They edit it. He runs the clip, and then he makes a funny face, and the whole audience has a Pavlovian response." -- Joe Scarborough on John Stewart over Jim Cramer